The days of the Defense Department’s regional combatant commands acting independently are long gone—nobody disputes that. But when it comes to how the commands can and should work together there is less agreement.

“Under the Cold War construct, the RCCs were largely self-sufficient. They had their own infrastructure networks and worked their respective regional issues. Today, we have a global threat and, as a result, we’re in much more of a collaborative environment,” says Navy Rear Adm. Nancy Brown, director of architectures and integration (J6) for the Northern Command.

The change in the level of interaction is palpable, Brown says, noting that information exchanges among RCC senior officers has ramped up radically just in the eight months since she came aboard at NORTHCOM in Colorado Springs, Colo. “We’re talking to each other now all the time,” she says. “When I was the vice J6 on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I rarely heard from them. But there’s a completely different attitude today because we are much more dependent on each other than we were.”

The need to keep up with changes globally prompted DOD senior brass to tap the Defense Intelligence Agency to consolidate and standardize high-end intelligence IT services for the five RCCs, the four other unified commands, U.S. Forces-Korea and the Multinational Force-Iraq into a single global enterprise. (See Defense Systems interview with DIA’s Michael Pflueger; go to www.defensesystems.com and enter 116 in the Quickfind search box.)

Intel Funnel
For 20 years, DIA has run the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System, the highly secure Defense and intelligence network used for voice communications and to pass data at the top-secret/sensitive compartmented information (SCI) classification level. In SCI postings, the owner of the data includes sources and methods used to gather the intelligence. To downgrade the classification of any data to a secret or lesser level requires stripping out these attributes and summarizing the contents of the intelligence postings.

Michael Pflueger, CIO for DIA, says that his organization is providing a common analytical data set and tools available worldwide for preparing and sharing data. “So whether you are an intelligence analyst at EUCOM [the European Command in Stuttgart, Germany] or at PACOM [the Pacific Command at Camp H.M. Smith, Hawaii] you will have access to the same SCI data across the whole enterprise,” he says.

But some in the RCCs—including Brown and Air Force Brig. Gen. Tom Verbeck, EUCOM’s director of command, control, communications and warfighting integration (J6) for the past three-and-a-half years—don’t feel the initiative goes far enough.

“I applaud what the DIA CIO has been doing. But from a combatant commander’s perspective, it still amounts to a stovepipe solution,” Verbeck says. “It doesn’t become an integrated IT solution. EUCOM has a huge area of responsibility. When you are trying to move information, a single integrated architecture becomes a big deal.” To have separate intelligence, operations and logistics architectures works against moving information seamlessly among warfighters and the noncombatant members of the U.S. team, he says.

Verbeck says that at EUCOM, his group has been trying to establish an integrated cross-domain, cross-functional­ method of sharing information. At the combatant commander’s level, he suggests that DOD needs to establish a system so that intelligence, operations and logistics information can move easily within each command’s area of responsibility, or AOR, as well as between commands and between the command and headquarters organizations back in the United States.

“Creating a big intelligence stovepipe or funnel doesn’t do that at all but keeps the information within the funnel and doesn’t allow us to horizontally move it,” Verbeck adds. “Right now, we basically operate three separate systems—top-secret, secret and unclassified—that are separate pipes that are not well integrated.”

Wedded IT Bliss
Defense should build a single integrated architecture that supports multilevel security with the appropriate firewalls, he recommends. Under this approach, a user wanting to gain access to free-flowing intelligence information tagged by classification level would require the appropriate credential. “I know for a fact that the National Security Agency is working very hard to try to achieve that,” Verbeck says. “It’s one of their top priorities in trying to meet the combatant commanders’ requirements.”

But Pflueger counters that this utopian scenario is well beyond current technological capabilities. “That requires a perfect multilevel secure environment in which the data and the applications are as nearly perfectly written as possible. So that when you log on, who you are, what your clearances are and what you have a need to know are well known to the system, and the data is protected,” he says.

Brown balks at this contention: “To say we need a perfect multilevel secure system is the wrong approach. We need to understand the risk and mitigate it, but to say that we’re not going to share information until we have a perfect solution to me is an excuse for not sharing.”

Pflueger acknowledges that DIA has built an SCI “data environment separate from the J6 systems, but it’s because the law requires that we work in a certain security domain.” DIA has two objectives for its efforts: standardize access to a global all-source intelligence environment where analysts can work at the highest level of classification and disseminate information as close to real time as possible via the Secret IP Router Network and coalition networks. To speed up the data flow down the command chain, DIA is also making use of IT tools to help analysts scrub data and downgrade the security classification of postings, Pflueger says.

Interaction at Issue
“What DIA is doing is a step in the right direction, but it just doesn’t go far enough,” Brown says. “It still is an intelligence stovepipe network. The true blending and collaboration isn’t there yet, and there are still some barriers that need to be broken in order to have true horizontal sharing of information.”

Interoperability is one of the military’s oldest and continuing goals. Success in combat operations hinges on the joint forces of the U.S. military services’ ability to integrate warfighting efforts by communicating and coordinating with one another and with coalition allies.

In DOD-speak, this is C 4ISR—an acronym so common that it’s rarely spelled out: command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. C 4ISR is a shifting and complex landscape that’s the backdrop for the debate spawned by the sharing of SCI data. Because DOD introduces new military technologies all the time, there is the constant challenge to make sure new tools are compatible with existing C4 systems, says Verbeck, who is also EUCOM’s director of international interoperability, concepts and experimentation (J9).

A large portion of the efforts of the Joint Forces Command since the early 1990s has been devoted to improving the integration of the tactical warfighting capabilities of the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force when the services come together in joint task forces. The C4 interoperability of multinational coalition forces—particularly the ability of coalition members to communicate and share information—has been a primary concern of the RCCs for many years. To that end, the commands conduct increasingly complex multinational interoperability exercises each year. These exercises incorporate new coalition allies and test whether the combined U.S. forces can integrate systems effectively for military, peacekeeping, disaster-relief and humanitarian deployments.

“From a command perspective, we are very concerned about coalition interoperability,” Verbeck says. “In fact, it remains one of the EUCOM commander’s top five priorities. Future operations in the European theater will involve combined forces from many different nations. Therefore, it’s critical that their communications and information systems are compatible and interoperable.”

Verbeck and his fellow chiefs at EUCOM recently wrapped up the 12th annual EUCOM-sponsored Combined Endeavor 2006, the largest of the C4 exercises testing fielded equipment that the U.S. military runs each year. More than 1,200 military and civilian personnel from 41 nations participated in the May event in Baumholder, Germany, and at the European Union Forces base near Tuzla in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In addition to U.S. forces, there were military participants from 38 European countries as well as Canada and South Africa. During the two-week exercise, the teams ran more than 1,000 communications tests.

IP Through and Through
Tom Cooper, a retired Navy captain, oversaw eight Combined Endeavor exercises beginning with the first in 1995 during stints as EUCOM’s deputy J6 acting and J6 and later as NATO’s deputy for command, control and communications. Cooper, who today is Cisco Systems Inc.’s defense initiatives manager for NATO, recalls that the early exercises involved jury-rigging connections between telephone equipment built to different standards so coalition participants could communicate with one another.

This year’s Combined Endeavor marked the first use of an all-IP network core infrastructure, supplied by Cisco, and focused mainly on passing high-security-level data over the IP backbone using voice over IP, private mobile radio, high-frequency and satellite communications links. Cisco technicians provided real-time videoconferencing and Web casting as well as administrative LANs to support the gathering and analysis of test results.

Cooper says the exercise begins its first week each year with a questionnaire that basically asks, “Have you changed any of your equipment from what you brought last year?” In the past that was a fairly easy question to deal with because if a participant had changed anything, it was generally an entire switch or an entire radio system. The question is far more complex now, he says, because a unit might have made several software codes changes or swapped out partial hardware components—changes that could mean equipment that worked previously with the other nations’ systems now won’t.

Annual Checkup
So that first week becomes a period of systems checks and tests to make sure all the “equipment still works like we thought it did,” Cooper says. This isn’t just for the exercise, either, he notes. Tests run during Combined Endeavor have eliminated a lot of frustrating trial and error during multinational deployments to Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, Cooper says.

The data amassed during these exercises is staggering, Cooper and Verbeck point out. In the fall, following the event, the Joint Interoperability Test Command at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., sends all the participants a CE Interoperability Guide of the test results and lessons learned compiled on CD. The guide is a cumulative collection of results from all the exercises. Through the 2005 event, it had reached more than 12,000 after-action review comments, test results and accompanying technical data.

Cooper points out that 13 of the past foreign delegation chiefs at Combined Endeavor today are flag officers in their respective countries, so the exercise also fosters international military cooperation through the building of personal relationships.

While a meeting of the chief players is useful, it’s the sheer value of using the systems in a performance environment that’s most crucial, Verbeck says. “Combined Endeavor is an operational exercise. It addresses how we move information back and forth and provide seamless command and control between multinational forces. Combined Endeavor 2006 is breaking new ground in many of the network areas that are being tested. Our goal is to tackle these types of challenges long before the call comes to deploy.”

Learn more about joint technology exercises: Go to www.defensesystems.com and enter 117 in the Quickfind search box.

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